Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.
Here are just a few of the coming features of Facebook Connect:
Trusted Authentication
Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.Real Identity
Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.Friends Access
Users count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.Dynamic Privacy
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.
Archive for the 'News' Category
With so many ways to aggregate and consume content, there needs to be a better way to filter the wheat from the chaff. This is the next hot idea starting to bubble around the net. ReadWriteWeb has a great article on the topic.
Eye-Fi Explore: At an MSRP of $129, Eye-Fi Explore will automatically locate nearby Wi-Fi networks and add location tags to pictures using Skyhook’s global Wi-Fi Positioning System. The new card will also allow users to upload their photos while away from home at more than 10,000 Wayport hotspots in the U.S. Includes 2GB storage; PC and Mac compatible. (For full details, see release entitled: Eye-Fi Unveils Automatic Geotagging and Hot Spot Connectivity with Eye-Fi Explore)
Eye-Fi Share: The features and simplicity of Eye-Fi’s original wireless SD memory card continue, priced at an MSRP of $99. Eye-Fi Share includes unlimited, secure Web-sharing service that allows users to automatically upload photos directly to their preferred photo sharing, social networking or blogging site, using their home wireless network. Includes 2GB storage; PC and Mac compatible.
Eye-Fi Home: Eye-Fi’s new wireless card, priced at an MSRP of $79, enables users to upload photos to their computer through their home Wi-Fi network. This card is designed for those who want to save the time and hassle of manually uploading photos via cables, cradles or card readers. Includes 2GB storage; PC and Mac compatible.
Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
Wikipedia defines Dataflow as:
Dataflow is a software architecture based on the idea that changing the value of a variable should automatically force recalculation of the values of other variables.
Flapjax is a new programming language built atop JavaScript. It provides a spreadsheet-like dataflow computation style, making it easy to create reactive Web pages without the burden of callbacks and potentially inconsistent mutation. Flapjax can be thought of in two ways: either as a library, for use in regular JavaScript programs, or as a new language that the compiler converts into generic JavaScript. In either case, the resulting programs can be run in a regular Web browser. In addition, Flapjax comes with persistent storage and a simple API that masks the complexity of using AJAX, along with sharing and access-control for server data.
Yet another new thing to learn.
Techcrunch has the scoop on a new startup launching today. The site is called Coolspotters and the premise is simple - discover and buy celebrity fashions (that’s my take on it from the article). The implementation to provide this service is what makes it interesting. The Techcrunch article says that it’s basically a structured wiki and the content is controlled and governed by the users. The article doesn’t mention whether user can submit celebrity photos, but users can “tag” items in photos with product information and the site will provide methods for purchasing a particular item. Users can also track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. Interesting idea.
“Support for OpenSolaris and MySQL on Amazon EC2 expands the reach and convenience for developers who want to quickly deploy their applications on the Web by taking advantage of Amazon Web Services,” said Rich Green, executive, vice president of Software, Sun Microsystems. “Sun aims to continue to offer additional options to use and deploy our open source platforms — covering the spectrum from small home-grown installations through to on-site data centers and hosted environments such as Amazon EC2.”
With this new offering, developers, enterprises, startups and students have enhanced options and support for rapid development and fast Web deployment on a Web-scale compute infrastructure, with capacity-on-demand. Amazon EC2 helps businesses and developers cost-effectively build, test, troubleshoot and deploy their highly-scalable applications. To learn more about Sun’s product support for Amazon EC2, visit www.sun.com/amazon and www.mysql.com/ec2.
New Relic - a Ruby on Rails performance and diagnostic service.
Adobe’s Open Screen Project - write once, play anywhere - opening up the runtime for Flash, removing licensing fees, publishing API’s and publishing Adobe protocols.
Web developers SEO cheat sheet
Zappos - a good example of using Twitter and social media to increase and maintain brand awareness.
Here’s another technology I need to start looking into: OAuth. ProgrammableWeb describes it as:
Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”
Google has stated that they are going to use this technology for all their API’s.
I just read a review about BooRah on ReadWriteWeb. I definitely think this is just the beginning of the future of the web. The site aggregates reviews from different sites on the web and serves up results based on semantic analysis and natural language processing - a very cool idea.
It’s interesting how semantic analysis and NLP are becoming hot topics since I was an AI (artificial intelligence) major in college. maybe LISP and Prolog will re-emerge as the next hot web application programming languages.